On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 11:03:20AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Stefano Zacchiroli dijo [Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 05:50:01PM +0100]:
> > > Uhm, why postpone this so long? I'd hope we could find a consensus quite soon.
> > > Then, we might not be able to fix _all_ web apps until squeeze, but at least
> > > tthose few with dir-or-file-in-var-www :-)
> >
> > I see it a tad more complicate than you, let's hope its me
> > overestimating the task :-)
> >
> > - the agreement actually should not come among web app maintainers, but
> > rather among web *server* maintainers: they should agree over a
> > specific dir and change the default configuration of the web server so
> > that that dir is the document root (for the default vhost, for web
> > servers supporting vhosts)
> >
> > * possibly, migrating to that would require offering migration paths
> > to package users
>
> That's easy, as there is fewer of us than web app maintainers. And it
> is a first step. We might even have a transitional symlink making
> /var/www point to /var/lib/www or whatnot?
I don't get it. This would of course solve the problem of FHS compliance
but apart from that it doesn't gain anything, does it?
My understanding of the problem is that we (as in package maintainers)
cannot drop our files in the document root of the system admin; there's
a chance of conflicting files. So, we avoid /var/www as this is meant to
be the sysadmin's place.
Currently packages handle the problem by looking for a safe place, i.e.
/var/cache/$package/html or something and provide a configuration for
the webserver (at least for apache2 this is done by several packages).
/var/www can remain docroot and the webserver still knows about the
newly installed webapp.
If we now introduce a new docroot, /var/www isn't the standard docroot
anymore, so
a) the webserver doesn't know about it and ignores the files of the local
admin,
b) the admin sees the new docroot and puts his/her files there (which is
wrong but I'm pretty sure it'll happen).
Now, do I totally misunderstand the issue here, or are we just moving
the /var/www problem to /var/lib/www?
Hauke